Jontavious Willis – Keeper of the Fire
by Matteo Bossi
Jontavious Willis came back to Lugano for the Bluest To Bop last July and on stage he confirmed all the qualities that were already evident on his first appearence on that same festival, five years ago. His blues are firmly rooted in the tradition, especially that of his home state, Georgia, Willis is a scholar and enthusiast of the music and its stories. And his new album “West Georgia Blues”, from which he premiered some new songs live in Lugano, shows all that. After his gig by the lake we had the chance to sit down on bench and talk with him. It turned into the interview that follows.
Your previous album came out five years ago, you wanted this new album to be a step further for you as an artist?
That’s the way to put it because five years are five years of life and we had covid in between. I had to make things happen and also being at home I became a better musician and a better storyteller. In other countries I play more older tunes, my interpretations of those…that’s the way of the blues. You change a song a little bit. My thing here is to showcase how the blues was, one man or just southern folks singing and the voice that they’re singing. I recorded some stuff in between the last album and this one, but I didn’t want to put that out until I got proper support and a proper label. I got fifteen original tunes, one instrumental. I produced it and I got some band stuff too not just solo, with Jayy Hopp I knew for him a long time, and Ethan( Leinwand )and Rodrigo (Mantovani) too and my friend Lloyd came out as well. For me I think you can play things that are in the family of the blues without compromising the sound. A lot of folks think that you have to make the sound to rock but that is not the only way…you can go to folk, Americana, R&B and still have the blues element. Rock is not the only way. A lot of people look a the old blues and say we come from here and now we’re here. But to me we come from here and still are a part of it. These guys laid the ground, the template, the vocabulary of the music, it’s up to us we can add to the vocabulary but it has to steam from this world. I mostly listen to blues but I also listen to rap and R&B but I don’t think to incorporate those things, because it’s already there, in the blues. The free verse stuff, nice pretty chords, entertainment, showmanship you can find them in the blues…if you dig deep enough in the blues, it’s already there.
You are a student of the history and also you got to be friends with some of the elders like John Dee Holeman.
That was my buddy John Dee Holeman! My grandfather is about 80 years old a little younger than Mr.John Dee and my great grandmother is gonna be 101 in eight days…we all stay close together. For me when I listen to the blues these are the first songs that black people got to sing after slavery, some of the songs might not talk about it but you can hear their minds, the musicianship…they got paid money to do the same thing we’re doing. In 1910 James Reese Europe and his jazz band came to Europe during the first World War. Lonnie Johnson or Alberta Hunter did the same, more than a hundred years ago they were overseas, you know? A lot of people don’t even know it. People don’t dig enough and that’s the problem. Most of the people that listen to blues now they got into blues through rock’n’roll and rock. Mostly guitar. That’s why I say that the British Invasion was good and bad. It was good because it brought attention to the artists, it was bad in the sense that it didn’t bring attention to the culture. And when the artists die the blues dies. And the whole demographic changed. Festival tickets became so high priced…and also black folks made a lot of music, disco or hip-hop are fifty years old! It’s crazy. Now it’s so many genres of music.
And we have a lot of young african-american blues artists.
Yes a resurgency! Marquise Knox, D.K. Harrell, Kingfish, Jay Hopp, Dylan Triplett, Sean McDonald, Stephen Hull, Jerron Paxton…or Harrell Davenport who’s just sixteen or seventeen years old and some other guys too. Me and Marquise used to go on social media, post stuff…we were playing different kinds of blues. Now everybody has his own thing. We went down to Mississippi in july 2020, when covid happened we need to make some money we would be driving through Mississippi listening to blues. It was so hot and also they had just taken down the rebel flag. Me and Marquise and Kingfish had already been down to the Blue Front to meet Mr Jimmy Duck Holmes in 2017…but we went back that summer. And Bobby Rush drove down from Jackson, Mississippi just him you know, to see us and talk to us about black folks…
I’m always about this, the blues is not like rap, there’s so much open space, we are black men that are connected to this stuff and you can’t take away black away from blues…in America people don’t understand history. It’s silly, I’m not asking nobody to clear the fault…they don’t want to feel guilty. This is a fact. Last time I was in Lugano Vasti Jackson told me to go read an article about Secession and why each state left the United States. Every southern state said “slaves” and when you get to Mississippi they said “we tried to have the native american here but their bodies could not take the heat, the black people can take the heat”! The states are telling you this. We’re the cotton fields of the United States. And then the governament denied education for free slaves for eighty years! You know what I’m sayin? And they didn’t even have the right to vote until the Sixties! My great-grandmama is born in 1923 she knew people that were born in slavery. It’s hard to have that conversation. Black folks and white folks still don’t really talk about this, our generation talks more, but the generation before talked less and the one before even less. I have a lot of white friends, but with some of them we don’t talk about politics…because a lot of people grow up listening to what their dad or their mama likes.
Jontavious Willis Lugano 2019 photo Gianfranco Skala
Is it different with other musicians?
I hang out with every musician but I don’t befriend every musician. There’s a lot of jealousy. Whatever is for you, is for you. Nobody else can have it, God, the Earth, The spirit has whatever you want to call has for you, no one can take it. People will see your success and say things. They say to me “you got this because of Taj Mahal”, but no I got this because I’m good. It’s like they did with Robert Johnson, you know it makes me mad, why can’t somebody just practice and be good? That’s what we deal in american culture. But I love America, that’s my home, I wouldn’t live in no other place. On the first song of the album I talked about my folks being in the same spot since 1823! If you’re somewhere for 200 years…that’s your home. Even 60 years is a long time. Europe got such an old history but America is a new baby, all the wounds are still fresh, you can still smell the blood.
All those things helped shape America…good and bad. Every country got it. We fight with our own family so of course you’re gonna fight with people you don’t know. But I don’t have any problem at home, where I live is about 80% black people. I bought a house last years in november with a little more over acre, enough land I can walk around, raise pigs. I got seven pigs at my grandmother’s house…My uncle died early this year, he was just sixty. He worked all the time, he would complain about back pain and he had a heart attack. Me and him raised hogs together. And my oldest uncle is so smart, he could do anything, he could do carpentry work, fix cars, he was a mechanic, he could do landscaping…anything. As a musician when you play music all your life sometimes you don’t learn stuff you should have learned before. I’m still kinda young and I want to learn all that.
You were friends with Phil Wiggins who passed away a few months ago?
Oh I tell you, Phil Wiggins invited me to a blues workshop and that was the first time I could really see what happens when you put a lot of like minded people together. It was in 2017, I met Andrew Alli and a lot of other folks…once you start getting in the circuit you meet people. I wasn’t really listening to him, but it was the same with Taj and Keb I didn’t really know them. I was listening to older stuff ever since I started.
Like Blind Willie McTell, Buddy Moss…?
Yes (laughs) that’s the shit! And that’s what I try to tell people. Mississippi had a great contribution to the blues, but I tell you why it ended up getting all the credit and they’re all talking about Mississippi. When the rediscovery happened all the folks in Georgia were either dead or not performing. Ma Rainey was dead, McTell was dead, Moss wasn’t recording, same as Charley Lincoln or Peg Leg Howell was sick…But Muddy Waters, B.B. King or Otis Rush they were all from Mississippi and they got to be alive during the Sixties and on video. But in Georgia they recorded blues years before Mississippi, Alabama too, if you think about Pinetop Smith or Cow Cow Davenport… every southern state has blues history…Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky…The folks in Mississippi started recording during the Depression except for Tommy Johnson, Rube Lacey, Charley Patton…who recorded in the late Twenties. Son House recorded in 1930. People associate being broke or uneducated with the blues but that’s not always the case, Ma Rainey had money, Tampa Red bought a guitar that was half the price of a Model A Ford, you don’t hear about those stories. It’s up to us, this new generation to talk about it, the old generation grew up like that, they don’t want to get in trouble…I don’t want to say stuff to make people mad but if it is a fact I’m gonna say it. You know one of the best thing that Keb’ Mo’ could ever tell me? I had a booking agency at the time and they wanted me to do a show and they told me if I didn’t do the show they would drop me…but I already had a show booked with Andrew Alli. I told Keb’ and he said “tell them to drop you”. “Don’t you go to school?” “Yes I have one more semester”. “Well, you can work”. “Yes, you’re right”. So i told them. And they said “no, n no we don’t want to drop you”. We have to take a stand, not like angry, we might lose something…if you don’t tell people that blues is black folks music they don’t understand. We grew up singing black music, It’s an extension of us, we don’t just sing like that for the song. And I’m not saying white people can’t sing the blues they always have, think about Frank Hutchison, Jimmie Rodgers, Riley Puckett…they played it in a style that’s theirs.
You have collaborated with other artists from Keb’ Mo’s generation, like Eric Bibb, you’re on his latest album.
I respect a lot the previous generation, Eric is one of my favorite blues writers. All those guys around his age, you can really hear their version of the blues, it’s really them, they’re not copying B.B. King or anyone else. Guy Davis is another good friend of mine, he comes from royalty! I love Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. This is the best time to be living. I wish the old guys would see us playing this thing. I know it sounds crazy but I got three dreams about blues musicians that I remember, they were so vivid, before the dreams were kind of hazy. The first person to see me was Buddy Moss and he was siting on stage and he gave me the guitar, just me and him, he was big dude, real tall and we talked. In another one I saw Big Joe Williams and then I was sitting there playing the piano and Sunnyland Slim came right behind me and whoop my ass on the piano…To me blues is not just music or something I do for profession, it really resonates with me, it’s a part of black life, rural life and black history. And I love history so very much. My daddy’s uncle was a country blues player. All these people from low Atlanta they didn’t get recorded much. George Mitchell went down there in the Sixties. My mama is a chef and she was cooking at a jail for a while, she doesn’t do it anymore, there was this guy who said his grandaddy was a bluesman. And I was “oh he probably don’t even know what blues is”, but when I looked him up it turns out it was George Henry Bussey! Precious Bryant’s uncle. He was still alive but he died a little bit after that, he was in a hospital. In that area there were people that were playing blues but not professionally, just for fun, neighborhood music. These small places with only under 700 or 600 people in the middle of nowhere had blues people there. They were never recorded.
Jontavious Willis photo Matteo Bossi
Like some of the artists that the Music Maker Foundation recorded.
Oh yes, Macavine Hayes, George Higgs, I knew Mr. Eddie Tigner and Mr. Albert White and Beverly Guitar Watkins, they’re from Georgia. You know folklorists and ethnomusicologists like John Lomax, Alan Lomax, George Mitchell…they recorded those folks. You can say something about them, but the musicians didn’t get money. Mitchell is a cool dude, he was doing because he loved the music…but some of the stuff he recorded came out many years after all those artists passed. And I don’t think the artists get much. It’s the same thing that keeps happening. Another problem is that black people are not coming to our shows, that’s because the tickets are high and the shows are usually not in their communities. Mostly I’m a pessimistic person but I’m hopeful, I’m optimistic about it, that things will turn. You know Jake Fussell? He’s from Georgia and his father Fred is a folklorist, He plays folk and blues and he’s a good friend.
Yes, and Fussell played with Precious Bryant and the Reverend John Wilkins too.
Oh man, you know I’m artistic director of a camp on the west cost called Port Townsend Acoustic Blues Festival. In 2018 I was not the artistic director, Jerron Paxton was, and Reverend John Wilkins with his daughters, he took me and my friend Jumaine to his room and he played us straight ahead blues, he was picking like his daddy…he was playing some old songs, he was so nice, he came in my class and we laughed. I just love to be around the elders. It’s like a living library. I was born in 1996 so I didn’t get to meet a lot of them…Marquise did, he’s a little bit older and he started before me, St. Louis was a big blues place.
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